How to Read More Books

Find the time you already have

Most people who read a lot don’t have more free time than anyone else. They read in the gaps: on the train, in a waiting room, over breakfast, in bed before the lights go out. Those gaps are already in your day. The question is what fills them.

Look at an ordinary weekday and note the moments when you’re waiting, travelling or winding down. A twenty-minute commute each way is forty minutes a day. The half hour before sleep is another thirty. You don’t need all of them; one or two reliable pockets are enough to change a year.

Tie reading to something you already do. When I sit down on the train, I open my book is easier to keep than read more, because the moment decides for you.

Make the book easy to reach

Small amounts of friction decide a surprising amount of what we do. If the book is upstairs and the phone is in your hand, the phone wins. So put the book where the reading happens: on the pillow, beside the kettle, on the sofa arm.

Carry one with you. A paperback in a bag, an ebook on your phone or an audiobook ready in your headphones turns every queue into a few pages. It helps to know what you’ll read next, too, so finishing a book doesn’t leave a gap of a week while you decide.

Set a small daily minimum

Pick an amount small enough to keep on a tired day: ten pages, or ten minutes. On good days you’ll read far more, and that’s fine. The minimum isn’t a target to beat; it’s the floor that keeps the book open.

If you miss a day, nothing is lost. Pick the book up the next day, at the page you left it. There’s nothing to keep up and nothing to make up; every page counts, whenever you read it.

A timer helps. Set it for twenty minutes, put the phone face down and read until it rings. A timed session has a clear start and end, which makes it easier to begin, and knowing how long you read is more useful than counting pages when books differ so much in density.

What twenty minutes a day adds up to

Small amounts add up more than they seem to. Take a reader who reads for 20 minutes a day, at about 40 pages an hour, and books of around 300 pages.

That’s 7,300 minutes over the year, or about 122 hours. At 40 pages an hour, it comes to roughly 4,870 pages, which is about 16 books of 300 pages. Ten minutes a day still gives you around 8 books; half an hour, around 24.

Your own numbers will differ. Dense non-fiction is slower than a thriller, and nobody reads at the same pace every day. The point isn’t the exact figure, only that a modest, regular habit carries a long way. To see what a goal would ask of you, try the reading goal calculator.

Choose books you want to read, and quit the rest

Nothing slows reading down like a book you don’t want to pick up. If you’ve been stuck on the same chapter for weeks, the book is probably the problem, not you. Put it down. Not finished is a perfectly good way for a book to end.

Try the first fifty pages, or the first hour, and then decide honestly. You can always come back to a book later, when the timing is better. Meanwhile, reading something you enjoy keeps the habit alive, and the habit is what gets you through more books.

Mix it up. Follow a long novel with something short, a demanding book with an easy one. Variety keeps reading from feeling like a duty.

Mix formats: audiobooks count

Listening to a book is reading it. Audiobooks fit time your eyes and hands are busy: driving, walking, cooking, folding laundry. Many people find that an audiobook on the commute and a paper book at night roughly doubles what they get through.

Ebooks have their own advantage: the book is always on your phone, so a spare five minutes is enough. Use whichever format suits the moment, and switch between them freely, even within one book.

Read with other people

Reading is solitary, but the reasons to keep going are often social. A book club, a friend reading the same novel or a partner you swap books with gives you something to look forward to: a conversation, a recommendation, an argument about the ending.

It doesn’t need to be formal. Telling someone what you’re reading, and asking what they’re reading, is often enough to keep the next book coming.

Reduce friction from the phone

For most of us, the phone is the main competition for reading time. You don’t need to give it up; just make it a little harder to drift into. Leave it in another room for the first half hour in bed, or turn on a focus mode while you read.

Or turn the phone into the book. Put your reading app or ebook on the home screen, where a social app used to be, so the habit of reaching for the phone becomes a habit of opening the book.

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